“From Valerie Jarrett to Sheryl Sandberg to Marissa Mayer, women are being tapped for more and more high-profile leadership roles. These women have become household names, and their success is promising for those of us who are fighting to close the gender gap in leadership. It is also heartening that we now have a record-breaking number of women in the Senate, thanks to the last election. But we have to acknowledge that the leadership gap is still wide. In fact, women make up only 18.3 percent of Congress, ranking us 77th in the world for gender representation in politics. And that’s not going to improve unless we take a hard look at why even today’s young women demonstrate a political ambition gap…

The findings from American University’s Girls Just Wanna Not Run report recently showed that the political ambition gap for young women is just as large as it is for potential professional female candidates and how that political ambition gap between the sexes starts early. The study proves what organizations like Running Start and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) have always known: that young women want to change and influence the world just as much as young men do, but they do not see politics as a way to do just that.”